Vitalik Slams EU Chat Control: “Everyone Deserves Privacy”

Vitalik Buterin criticizes the Chat Control law adopted by the EU because it weakens privacy and defends authorities. He demands unhackable communications.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin publicly protested against the proposed Chat Control in the European Union. 

Source –X

He said that making security by intruding on privacy is ultimately unsuccessful. In X, Vitalik said, we all need privacy and security in our private communications, and there should not be any hackable backdoors to it. He also stressed that security should not be at the expense of individual security.

Vitalik also pointed out a hypocrisy. In a leak by an EU Reporter, interior ministers seek to have themselves, along with security agencies, exempted from the required message scanning. 

Vitalik noted that this makes the lawmakers familiar with the dangers of the law themselves.

Hypocrisy and Privacy Risks in EU Chat Control

The draft law requires the platforms to scan the private messages before encryption to detect illegal content. 

It supposedly combats child sexual abuse but threatens to ruin the privacy of everyone at the expense of encrypted data. Mandatory age verification is also introduced by the law, destroying online anonymity.

In a leaked draft, EU ministers, police, and military express a desire to have their own communications scanning exemptions. Analysts caution that this spares the sensitive state secrets at the expense of the common people from mass surveillance. 

The identical protections the EU withholds upon ordinary users would spill over to medical, legal, or intimate information.

The move was lamented by Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer, who described it as a testament to the fact that the snooping algorithms suggested are hazardous and untrustworthy. 

He explained that governments fear foreign powers exposing their secrets, while common people lack the means to secure communications. Vitalik echoed this, saying politicians granted themselves exemptions to laws they knew would harm citizens.

This law is an example of a collision between the rights to child safety and the rights to digital privacy. Privacy activists point out that the creation of backdoors undermines the security of all. 

Vitalik cautioned that the suggested legislation may encourage more users to use decentralized Web3 applications with robust encryption to avoid surveillance by the state.

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